Sneak Peeks, Coming Attractions, Works-In-Progress Redux

[GavinP01]

Looking very nice.
Many thanks for all the hard work you and Jason and putting into the game.
I was wondering though if there are any more "week in" scenarios planned for Hue or the Tet offensive?
I really enjoy those lengthy scenarios.
Thanks.
Gavin.

[Jason Petho]

Yes, I have lots of A WEEK IN style scenarios planned for Middle East and Vietnam.

The key is time, I need more time in a day or a clone or two or win the lottery so I can do this full time.

I love those style campaigns, so definitely want to make more!

[Crossroads]

It's been a while, so time to scribble a few updates again!

I thought it’d be neat to dive under the hood of our scripted AI feature. Here’s the first part of what I hope will be a three-part blog series:

• Scripted AI in Campaign Series

The link opens the post on our CSLegion site.

Lots of text, not so many pictures. Still, here are some highlights of the latest and greatest updates to our CSEE API library.

Next up, we’ll dive into the fun part—dissecting the latest evolution of the anatomy of our Lua scenario file!

I originally planned to take time this weekend to write the second part of the Scripted AI series to depict the new features CSEE offers for the coming update.

But since we also decided to take the opportunity to make the next update a full reimage for Vietnam 2.00, I've been working on game documentation, too.

For the past several days I have edited Berto's CSEE How-To documents into game manual format, first for Middle East How-to guideline originally written for Middle East 2.0, or Volume I, as I named it. That was some 50 pages to edit, so nothing there, really, except a neat walk in the memory lane. The guideline still serves as a nice briefing on the Event Engine.

What took much longer was to edit his Vietnam 1.0 Rung Sat scenario CSEE scripting efforts he documentend here in the Vietnam Scenario design and modding forum. At around page 180 I thought that covers it well enough, so that is now another CSEE How-To guideline, marked as Volume II.

Both of them are available for download in my CS Legion post: https://cslegion.com/coder-diary/cs-eve ... -i-and-ii/ (link opens to our CS Legion website post).

Also: both guidelines will be available in both games in their Manuals folder for ease of access.

Another teaser from that post is a quick overall summary of latest and greatest with the next Vietnam 2.00 update. Our first full reimage of this game.

What do you think? I am happy to answer any questions you guys might have.

Part two of my planned Scripted AI trilogy is now available on our CS Legion website: https://cslegion.com/coder-diary/script ... briefings/

This time, I dive into some of the new CSEE features by exploring our Scenario Briefings and highlighting what’s new under each SMEAC letter.

The final part of the trilogy, focusing on the new Battle Plans, is hopefully coming out by the end of the month.

[Crossroads]

Shout for the 2.00 Public Beta becoming available on this thread as well!

Your feedback appreciated

[Crossroads]

With Vietnam 2.00 having been out for over a week now, it is due time to get the Sneak Peeks started again, right!

We aim to have two annual updates out going forward, and with this big one out now for the Remastered Edition, the Summer update will be focusing on the UI side of things.

There's a good few players out there with 4K displays, and it is not clear sailing for out'r Win32 api game engine and how it does - or does not - Desktop Scale for some of you. It is a Win32 thiing, too. it has a rudimentary Scale but nothing like the latest UI frameworks have.

We are addressing this by trying to have at least the worst offenders out of the way.

While we were vetting the builds, I had a new fork out with version control, and changed all the fonts in the game to WIndows system fonts. Gone are Arial from game engine itself, and Times New Roman from map labels.

I did a few quick mock ups to select a way forward, too. I briefly tried C++ and WinUI3 integration, which is the latest Microsoft offering. I tried that with linked libraries, but the CLI bridge just refused to co-operate with me when trying to use the WinUI3 dll from Win32 exe.

Next, as I really wanted to use C# and WPF rather, I thought to create an independent desktop dialog app the game engine would launch and communicate with using named pipes. That actually worked a treat, so while I am still deciding the way forward, this seems to have solved two issues.

Scenario Briefings can now be kept open aside the game. The current iteration, if used in a single display, goes to background if you click at game titlebar, but remains in front while playing the game. Here it is with my Wide Screen where I put it to right side of display, where it can lay unobstructed.

And for all Damage and Assault related stuff, a new Intel Feed dialog app. This is smaller, you can move it around as well, similar to Scenario Briefing, you can resize it, but this one always stays at the top of things. So with single display, it hovers there all the time. Instead of those tiny messages that previously needed to be managed manually, or to put a timer to them, all that is now forwarded here.

WPFpipeservers.jpg (523.65 KiB) Viewed 902 times

After these ones have proved their mettle with some further testing and tweaking, I will try to make the Jump map non-modal, but keeping it WIn32. So, hopefully in the next update, Jump map is always available and up to date for quickly zooming into another area of the game map. In Vietnam particularly, those maps are quite large, so I think this would be quite helpful.

Let me hear what you all think


PS Unit List at the left side is most certainly on the to-do list. Note how for instance the Hex Info dialog has text that is actually in the bitmap image, and not dynamic font. Same with the Unit Compass Rose. We can do better than that.

[benpark]

Excellent stuff, greatly appreciated.

The unit boxes are the thing that I struggle with a bit in terms of seeing the values without squinting, as they are quite small with the larger screen real-estate. I'm not that aged, so I suspect I'm not the only one.

[Crossroads]

Excellent stuff, greatly appreciated.

The unit boxes are the thing that I struggle with a bit in terms of seeing the values without squinting, as they are quite small with the larger screen real-estate. I'm not that aged, so I suspect I'm not the only one.

Yes, for what ever reason, the two elements that most often fail the Scale are Toolbars, and Unit list. I wish to try to make Unit list another non modal dialog, while with Toolbars, perhaps another way to load them and to display them.

[Zovs]

Its hard to tell anything from that screenshot, can you post a link to the image (something like Imgur for example) so we can see it in full screen?

[Crossroads]

Certainly. Right click the screenshot, and opt to have the image open in a new tab.

At this stage I have forwarded the Damage Result, Assault Status, and Command Report dialogs all to stream into Intel Feed dialog instead.

First, with aid of the W11 windows positioning aid, I grabbed the game engine dialog from its titlebar, move to top center of display, choose the option with three equal sized vertical windows, and positioned it in the center. I then chose the Scenario Briefing dialog to right side, Intel Feed dialog to left side, and repositioned them a bit by moving the game engine edges left and right.

This is a screenshot from PK15 at the beginning of turn 2 for Side B (first side). I am playing both sides manually against myself. Note the Intel Feed stream still showing all the previous action from my previous French turn, and now reporting the Command Report for my VM second turn. As I am playing against myself, I would next need to update the Scenario Briefing back to VM side from Status->Scenario Briefing. I wanted to show the Phase Box though.

It is much more streamlined to play now, although it may require some getting used to having for instance the back and forth opfire stream updating the Intel Feed in realtime while the action takes place.

WPFpipeservers2.jpg (1.94 MiB) Viewed 845 times

[Zovs]

Certainly. Right click the screenshot, and opt to have the image open in a new tab.

Thank you very much!

Yes, the new layout and fonts looks fantastic!

[Crossroads]

Certainly. Right click the screenshot, and opt to have the image open in a new tab.

Thank you very much!

Yes, the new layout and fonts looks fantastic!

Thanks! Just to make sure what is on display are three separate dialogs, aligned to fit the available monitor space to full.

[benpark]

Better and better, building upon already great stuff.

Are those hex numbers clickable, in order to get the camera to go to that location? That may help in the larger scenarios.

[Crossroads]

Better and better, building upon already great stuff.

Are those hex numbers clickable, in order to get the camera to go to that location? That may help in the larger scenarios.

Great idea, at the moment it is a static feed, but it should be possible to mark those hex coors into hyperlinks as they are in tag format already, then send back to game to move the hotspot accordingly.

[Crossroads]

I now have the first iteration of the new Options - Intel Feed implemented. Options menu is getting quite ridiculous atm, it is a wish list item to convert all this to a User Preference dialog instead. Not sure when, but I believe it would be a better way to view and understand all the options available. And there are a few!

Here is the current implementation, with Options - Damage Results - Persistent toggled ON.

damageresults_og.jpg (955.77 KiB) Viewed 725 times

And here is how that would look like in the next Update.

damageresults_ng2.jpg (1.02 MiB) Viewed 725 times

[Crossroads]

And here is the new IntelFeed option toggled ON. This grays out all legacy Damage Results options.

And yes, those hexes are now hyperlinks you can click to move the map to said hex. Neat.

damageresults_ng.jpg (962.3 KiB) Viewed 724 times

[benpark]

This is a huge improvement. Thank you guys for progressing the engine.

[Crossroads]

This is a huge improvement. Thank you guys for progressing the engine.

Thanks for the idea, @benpark! Here is the Scenario Briefing with similar interaction available from there, too:

scenbrief_hyperlinks.jpg (1.1 MiB) Viewed 672 times

[benpark]

Somewhat related (I'll move anything further to the Suggestions area from here on out to not clutter this important thread)-

I did notice that I forget to re-check the checkbox options on the initial screen (full-screen, etc), and had to restart to select my desired options. That's on me as user-error, but it would be nice if they stayed as selected for the next game, as I expect most of us will stick with what we use.

[Crossroads]

From the Vietnam Tech Support subforum: a request to have screen edge scrolling supporting multiple displays. In other words, only scroll when cursor near the edges of the display where the game window resides. Once you leave that display to your other display(s), scrolling should stop. Implemented and available in the late summer Update:

Sat down today to implement this. Available in the next Update. I set an area of 70 px wide around the screen edges that invoke each of the scroll directions. Once you exit the display the game runs on, it stops scrolling.

Edit Available in 2.00.04, that is. The release version (2.00.03) of the current 2.00.02 Public Beta is already handed out to Matrix tech team a couple of weeks ago. 2.00.03 likely becomes available next week.

Redefined this further as we want access to game Menu or Minimize/Maximize buttons, and to game icons at the bottom, without triggering scrolling. I believe this should do it:

Code: Select all

const int SCROLL_MARGIN_HORIZONTAL = 70; // pixels from the left/right edge to start scrolling
const int SCROLL_MARGIN_VERTICAL = 5;    // pixels from the top/bottom edge to start scrolling

I guess most players have their multiple displays next to each other horizontally, not on top of each other. Right?

[Crossroads]

In today's sneak peek, a wish list item ticked off the list: an Airstrike version affecting the whole targeted hex.

For now, we had two types of Airstrikes:

• The "classic" one, where an airstrike randomly picks a unit from the targeted hex and attacks that one.
• The B-52 ARC mission, that not only hits all units within the target hex, but also impactsall the units in adjacent hexes (these with reduced firepower).

Now, we also have the full-hex Airstrike, now enabled (only) for Napalm.

Here it is in its glory, on the left the previous implementation hitting just one unit, on the right the version impacting all units in the target hex.

With the current version of airstrike, the lucky buggers escaped any results, despite being in the open. In the new one, the Dice of Fortuna was less forgiving. (Hmm, I need to add a linebreak between the Airstrike results for proper formatting)

Code: Select all

2025-05-25 14:23:13 vnengine.exe: [TRACE ID 2011] (phasem.cpp, line 1051, PhaseMenu::ResolveAirstrikes()) entering PhaseMenu::ResolveAirstrikes()
2025-05-25 14:23:13 vnengine.exe: [INFO ID 1] in AirMine::AirstrikeResolve(), Napalm airstrike on VC Rifle Platoon 63 B at ahex 40,24
2025-05-25 14:23:13 vnengine.exe: [INFO ID 1] in AirMine::AirstrikeResolve(), Napalm airstrike on VC Medium Machine Gun at ahex 40,24

napalm.jpg (454.7 KiB) Viewed 311 times